Germany has long been behind the curve in European pay TV, but stimulated by the arrival of HbbTV and the acceptance which has come with Broadcast Catch-up, paid OTT is turning into a huge fight for dominance in the largest European market.
We have a total of ten separately detailed profiles for Germany; which cover Deutsche Telekom, Unitymedia, Kabel Deutschland, M7 Deutschland, Tele Columbus, and Sky Deutschland; as well as the pure play OTT providers Zattoo, Maxdome, Watchever, and Magine TV.
The Germany report and forecast covers all of these, with the addition of the broadcasters RTL, ARD, ZDF, and ProSiebenSat.1; as well as pure play providers Netflix, Amazon, and Videoload.
German catch-up holding OTT break-through at bay
Germany’s pay TV sector is still playing catch-up with its European peers as penetration grows by 10% a year, but is still considered to be just 20% compared with a global av-erage of 48%. Our own pay TV numbers show that to be something of a half-truth, given that 20 million homes have basic cable TV or better, and pay at least something for it, but in many cases this is within a housing service contract, paying just €10 a month.
Yet the overall German TV market remains dominated by the various public and advertising-funded channels that are free to air, while at the same time OTT-only players such as Netflix have arrived to provide new sources of competition. This may choke off growth for those pay TV operators without premium sporting rights.
Germany was an early adopter of HbbTV (Hybrid Broad-cast Broadband TV), which means the majority of homes already access OTT TV through the main broadcast catch-up services from RTL, ARD, ZDF, and ProSiebenSat.1 – each seeing around 14 million to 15 million unique monthly viewers, but with a huge chunk of these overlapping. These figures are not necessarily multiscreen OTT, but cus-tomers are watching OTT streams as much as the broad-cast streams and, increasingly, all TV will end up hybrid in some way.
The four main broadcasters in Germany account for around 60 million OTT viewers in 2015, and this will in-crease to almost 90 million by 2020. But of course the vast majority of the 15 to 20 million monthly viewers of each free service will be the same 15 to 20 million viewers due to the high penetration of HbbTV services in the country. When we factor this in, it gives us a clearer picture, show-ing an estimated total number of individual OTT viewers in Germany at around 30 million in 2015, and some 62 million by 2020.
This Report is 60 pages long and is priced at $650